Blog Post

Profiting From The Live Web

: Newsweek’s April 3 issue hypes social networking with “Putting The ‘We’ In Web” — and the glossy images of Flickr creators Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake. All the usual suspects get mentions — MySpace, del.icio.us, Craigslist, Facebook, YouTube — and some would-bes — Imeem, even Mary Hodder’s stealthy video-sharing Dabble. (Hodder also gets to redub Web 2.0 as “the live web.”) A sidebar picks up on some “hot” startups — Digg, among them. It does little to dispel the notion that these are companies that make money by being acquired, not by creating new empires.

— “Google CEO Eric Schmidt says that he doesn’t understand why people think his company wants to be the next Microsoft. ‘Everybody thinks we’re building operating systems, PCs and browsers. They clearly don’t get it,’ he says. So where does Google want to go? ‘Look at MySpace,’ he says cryptically. ‘Very interesting.'”

— “‘When people say to me it’s a Web 2.0 application, I want to puke,'” says venture-capitalist Guy Kawasaki. On the other hand, he admits that plenty of the ideas make sense. ‘People do want to share. They want collaboration, full time. They want all that kind of stuff.'”

— Yahoo’s Bradley Horowitz on acquiring Flickr: “With less than 10 people on the payroll, they had millions of users generating content, millions of users organizing that content for them, tens of thousands of users distributing that across the Internet, and thousands of people not on the payroll actually building the thing. That’s a neat trick. If we could do that same thing with Yahoo, and take our half-billion user base and achieve the same kind of effect, we knew we were on to something.”